Robert Hughes
Robert Hughes
Most remembered for a bestselling Australian historical study titled The Fatal Shore, he also worked as a Time magazine art critic and hosted an art-themed television program called The Shock of the New.
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth28 July 1938
CountryAustralia
art war forever
In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.
war distance flower
When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.
defined ends exact judgment means power sanity terms visual
if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.
four hours left project side work
I can work four hours on the right side of the project and go back to the left side, and it's all changed.
christmas xmas heart
Christmas began in the heart of God. It is complete only when it reaches the heart of man.Why wait for a call when you have a command?
imagination protein modernism
Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.
art add process
Works of art... do not force meanings on their audience; meaning emerges, adds up, unfolds from their imagined centres... takes one through the process of discovering meaning.
loss issues drug
We've got a recipe for disaster. It's huge -- this combination of body image issues and the drug's weight loss appeal.
moving offering aggressive
Now that rates are moving up, we're seeing more aggressive offerings from banks.
evil world made
Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.
running art thinking
What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.
america race class
America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory.
wisdom australia evil
We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism
wisdom art australia
Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art